


First Move Advantage

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Banter, Bonding, Chess, Gen, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:15:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27261841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: "You can't move pawns backward," Ward said, catching Danny's hand in the process of doing exactly that."What? Why not? That doesn't sound right. All the other pieces can move any direction.""Which one of us had three years of chess lessons, Danny?"
Relationships: Ward Meachum & Danny Rand
Comments: 19
Kudos: 43
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	First Move Advantage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [etothey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/gifts).



Ward had finally managed to get the little stove going and the room halfway warm when Danny breezed through the door and brought half the outdoors with him.

"Nope," Danny said cheerfully, brushing snow out of his hair. "Still snowing, pass still closed, no one going anywhere. I did find a guy with a yak who said he'd guide us—"

"No." 

"See, I told him no because I knew you'd say that." Danny produced a large clay pot from under the stupid cowboy coat he wore everywhere now. "Look, I got us dinner. It's from the yak guy's wife."

"What is it?" Ward asked, resigned.

"No idea."

It was actually pretty good, some kind of savory, spicy stew with chunks of meat and vegetables. They ate sitting on the rug next to the small stove—there were no chairs—while the room slowly warmed up again. After eating, with the sensation finally returning to his toes, Ward sprawled on the rug next to the stove and tried to muster the energy to get up, while Danny (who had the energy of a hyperactive toddler on an entire bag of Pixy Stix) went poking around the room in search of something to do.

Under other circumstances, it would have been actually kind of cozy. There were bunk beds heavily draped in colorful woolen bedspreads, and some shelves with random books and other items left behind by decades of high-country backpackers before them.

"Khalil Gibran's _The Prophet,"_ Danny reported.

"Hippies were here," Ward said to the ceiling, hands resting loosely on his chest.

"In French."

"French hippies. Not an improvement."

"A _National Geographic_ from 1982 ..." Danny continued to report, making a stack on one end of the shelf. "A romance novel called _The Pirate's Booty_ with, uh, some very well-worn pages ... not sure what this is about but I think it's in Hindi ... a DVD of _Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie_ —that we don't have anything to ... Ooh, look, Ward! Board games!"

Ward threw his arm over his face. He was already tired enough from slogging through the snow to get here. "Pass."

"Oh, come on. Let's at least see what they have."

Danny moved Ward's feet to make room on the rug. Ward propped himself up on his elbow while Danny blew dust off the boxes. They all looked like they'd been nibbled on by mice.

"I think this one is a jigsaw puzzle." Danny opened it. "And, um, that is definitely _not_ 500 pieces in there." He put it aside. "A game of Operation ... missing the patient. Oh, travel chess!"

"Do you even know how to play chess?" Ward asked as Danny opened the folding case. The pieces were all in a jumble inside, on top of the folding board that the case turned into.

"Sort of? I remember a little of it." Danny glanced up. "I remember you trying to teach me how to play it. Long time ago."

"How'd that go?" Ward said, not quite willing to admit that _he_ didn't remember. What he mostly remembered about chess was that Dad had insisted that he learn to play it, because Dad had some kind of idea that it was a gentleman's pursuit and developed critical thinking skills. Ward had had a chess tutor and had thoroughly loathed it.

"Uh, you got mad and threw the board across the room."

Ward grimaced. "Sounds like me."

Danny smiled a little. He was laying out the small plastic pieces of the travel set on the thickly napped, colorful weave of the rug. "I just wanted to do it because you were always playing it. I used to think it looked fun."

 _Dad made me,_ was on the tip of Ward's tongue, but he managed not to say it.

"Aww, damn," Danny muttered. "I think it's missing some pieces."

Ward sat up all the way, drawn, reluctantly, by the disappointment in Danny's voice. "It's missing at least half of them, from the look of things."

"I don't know; I don't remember how many there are supposed to be."

"A lot more than that."

"Oh well," Danny said, with the faintest sigh, and started to put the pieces back into the box, carefully this time.

"You really want to play it," Ward said, watching him.

"Well ... don't you? I remember it was fun, back in the old days."

"When I used to throw the board around."

"Maybe without that part."

"For crying out loud," Ward muttered. He reached for the folding case. "Look ... let's just—I bet we could replace the missing pieces with something."

God, it was like a light bulb coming up, Danny's sudden delighted brightening. He jumped up and came back with their packs.

The set was missing a random assortment of pieces from both white and black. "Someone probably threw them off a mountainside," Ward muttered, and Danny laughed, while they tried to find something relatively uniform to replace them. They settled on pieces of wood from the stove's firewood box for white, and pebbles for black. Ward marked the pieces with strokes from a charcoal pencil: K for knight, P for pawn, and so forth.

And then they found out how much they remembered between them of the rules of chess, which, as it turned out, wasn't a whole lot.

"You can't move pawns backward," Ward said, catching Danny's hand in the process of doing exactly that.

"What? Why not? That doesn't sound right. All the other pieces can move any direction."

"Which one of us had three years of chess lessons, Danny?"

"That is blatantly anti-pawn." Danny scowled at him. "Are you sure? I mean, _sure_ sure? I think I remember doing it before."

"Maybe that's why I threw the board across the room." But now he really _wasn't_ sure. 

*

"Kings can't jump other pieces. That's checkers."

"I really think they should be able to, Ward."

"The rules don't work that way."

"But if they can't, the king is basically useless as a piece."

"Yes. It is."

"But if it could jump other pieces it would be less useless—and you'd be able to take that knight of mine, come to think of it."

"Okay, _fine._ The king can jump pieces. Gotcha."

*

"There has _got_ to be some rule about the number of queens you can have on the board at one time."

"You're the one who told me you can turn other pieces into queens, Ward!"

"Pawns! Pawns only!"

*

"No, we are not resolving a stalemate through single piece-on-piece combat."

"What if we see if we can throw the pieces into that basket over there? Best three of three wins."

"This is ridiculous," Ward muttered, but he was laughing, and Danny had already picked up one of the remaining pebbles.

He lost, as he knew he was going to, because Danny's hand-eye coordination was terrifyingly good, but it was probably the most fun he'd had playing chess in his entire life.

*

"You know," Danny murmured as they wrapped up in blankets on the bunk beds, with nothing but the glow of the fire to illuminate the small room, "we could get an actual one of those ... a travel set with all the pieces, where we don't keep forgetting which piece is which because we smudged out the charcoal marks. And for the record, you totally cheated on that one queen."

"You had like five queens," Ward muttered, burying his face in his pillow. "You didn't need another one."

"Thanks for playing with me, anyway. You know something?" Danny rolled over, the upper mattress creaking under him. Danny loved top bunks, so Ward always gave it to him, since he didn't care one way or another.

"Ngghhh, I thought we were sleeping."

"You always did, you know," Danny said, to the dark. "Play games with me. Even if you didn't want to. I mean, sometimes you were a jerk about it. Okay, a lot of times you were a jerk about it. But you still taught me to play chess."

"Nnnnn. I still think you're wrong about the pawn rule."

Ward half-opened his eyes at sudden, renewed creaking above him, which turned out to be Danny dangling over the side of the bunk bed and reaching down to give Ward's shoulder a quick squeeze. At least, that was probably what it was supposed to be, but because it was almost entirely dark, he smacked Ward in the face instead.

"Ow!"

"Sorry!"

"Don't make me come up there," Ward muttered, and Danny laughed, but there was a sort of affectionate swipe across Ward's hair and then Danny's hand pulled out of reach.

"Anyway," Danny said from the top bunk, "this was fun. Thanks."

"I mean, we could have been reading _The Pirate's Booty,"_ Ward said to the underside of the bunk, and up above him, Danny cracked up.

"We should take it with us. We can read chapters around the campfire. And act them out with chess pieces."

"Go to _sleep._ "


End file.
